Rural Australia: The former gold rush town of Omeo, a local aboriginal tribal word meaning mountain or hill is, appropriately enough, at the foot of the Victorian alps. Having come down from the out-of-season skiing resort of Falls Creek yesterday we landed as night began to fall, knowing nothing about the place.
Spent yesterday crossing the alps into the traditional dairy and cattle Gippsland so weren’t expecting it to still be an old gold town but as soon as we clocked the original Victorian buildings there was no doubt about it’s origins. Victorian gold rush towns are absolutely unmistakable.
We’ve now found out that Omeo, in its day, was known as Australia’s Dodge or Tombstone – the wildest, west-est, gold town in Oz, where life was cheap, the women wild, and the men mad, bad & dangerous to know. A lot of the 19th century stuff burnt down in the Black Friday fires of 1939 but enough remains to get a feel of it. Especially as the whole town lies along the main street, called Day Avenue which is charmingly sparse, as I hope my photos show. At the last census a few years ago the population was 406, a bit down from its gold rush heyday.
One of the reasons we are hanging round because this is one of the few places in Australia where platypuses can be seen in the wild. There have been frequent recent sitings and, having always been at the top of my bucket list, we are not leaving until that box is ticked.
We are staying the night in a traditional old Aussie country pub – we were, last night, free camping down on the river – but because Robyn is not feeling great I decided, executive decision, she needs a proper bed, room, and not having do do anything like dinner or whatever, so here we are; amongst all kinds of misfits and riffraff; so, right at home
We’ve been sweltering in frequent 30°+ days the last three weeks and, today, the rains are finally coming. Not here yet but the skies are dark and grey, if not actually black. Hence the darker hues of these photos.
